from the privacy-vs.-data-retention dept

Slashdot points us to a story about how many EU Parliament Members signed on to a declaration supporting the creation of an "early warning system to combat sexual child abuse." Sounds good, right? But the devil is very much in the details. Christian Engstrom notes that many of the MEPs who signed on didn't realize that part of the declaration was to extend already controversial data retention laws to search engines, meaning that Google would need to store your search results far beyond what they currently do, just in case law enforcement wants to go trolling through your search history.

Of course, this seems doubly ironic since so many European countries are up in arms over Google collecting data via open WiFi networks. So, which is it, Europe? Do you want Google not to collect data, or do you want Google to save data for years in case police want to snoop through it? No, the two situations are not identical, but there is a clear conflict between EU privacy rules and EU data retention rules. On the one hand, they give Europeans the ability to supposedly take control over their private info, including requiring companies to delete it. On the other hand, they demand that companies store data in case the police would like to look through it.

If we only had an evil search engine. A product that existed solely to alert you to the dangers of its existence.

Seriously, if google came out and said they were going to start recording your data and publishing it to anyone who wanted to look at it. Oh and its free for law enforcement, you'd see ever civil liberty group up in arms.

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In the event

I have a plan for when I feel my privacy is violated too much and that is to run a job on my computer to randomly browse the web at all hours of the day and night. It will simply plod along and read all kinds of interesting pages from Google and Yahoo. If my data can't be private, I'll simply pollute all of it with useless noise. My job will have to make sure it's not too regular and predictable, after all, there are smart people who could filter my noise based on patterns. So if they are going to be saving my data, I'm going to give them a ton!

Re: Re: Re: TRICKED? Are they less aware than you and me?

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'you can't have your cake and eat it too' would be expressed in modern, normal english, if it weren't a 'saying', as: "you can't eat your cake and still keep it" (that still doesn't sound right). basically, think of a really awesome looking cake. the sort people say 'that looks so good it'd be a shame to eat it'. well, they can either observe it's awesomeness, or eat it, but doing one precludes the other happening at the same time, and eating it prevents you from then viewing it as an awesome cake. (we'll leave it's other states and later events aside for now.)

Re: Re: Re: TRICKED? Are they less aware than you and me?

"THAT'S MY POINT! After so long and uniform a history, it can't be simply stupidity."

Actually if you think about it this way it makes sense. You have 100 politicians, each trying to get his or her own agenda pushed forward. He or she only cares about the agenda they put forward. They make deals to get their agenda implemented without realizing what the others are actually up to. The winning in politics is like gambling, its an endorphine rush and very addictive.